Lab News
5 June, 2008
New content - Three new SGI publications are available in the Retrotechnology Articles section of the site: Using the Light Pen, Using the Laser Printer, and Using the Color Printer. These documents are contemporary with the IRIS 2000 and IRIS 3000 series machines.
R. Stricklin, curator
31 May, 2008
Cleaned up the typesetting in the SGI PDF collection quite a lot. This should facilitate more accurate text indexing for Google, et al. The documents have been re-edited to clean up some mistakes, and the fonts now much more closely match those in the originals.
New content - SGI IRIS Series 3000 Owner's Guide, Version 2.0. This complements the Version 1.1 document already published here. It adds information on the IRIS Series 3100 systems, GL2-W3.5, and has an intact Chapter 7 (Optional Peripherals) which is missing from my copy of Version 1.1. Two early editions of Silicon Graphics Pipeline---Fall 1985 and Spring 1986---have been added to the site, as well.
CSS update - When I coded the CSS for this site, no currently available browsers supported the nth-child rules. Safari 3.1.1 finally adds support for them; therefore, tables on the site now render as intended. It's possible that other browsers also have recently added, or may soon add support. I may be inspired to tweak the CSS a bit.
R. Stricklin, curator
28 July, 2007
New content - Compaq Deskpro 386 Personal Computer Maintenance and Service Guide. You know where to find it.
Enjoy.
R. Stricklin, curator
28 March, 2007
I'm coming up for air after having been working on the restoration of a couple of IBM R/390 systems. I had an existential moment during the process and did a quick screen grab representing a single instant in a week-long, heads-down, hardcore hack session. I can't say it's exactly an everyhacker sort of artifact as there aren't many folks who look at 3270 sessions on a regular basis anymore, but it's still somehow connected on a fundamental level to a sort of hacker's collective subconscious (if such a thing could be said to exist).
Also, I get asked a lot by friends and family, "so what is it you do at work?"
Well, this is it.
R. Stricklin, curator
10 March, 2007
The Retrotechnology Articles section is getting big enough that it's starting to face some organizational shortcomings which will only get worse as things grow. I'm starting to distill some ideas on how to tackle the problem; as a first step I've started reorganizing the documents into a card-catalog type structure, where the links in the index lead to an intermediate page with document metadata and a link to download the PDF. Hopefully this will assist people browsing the listings casually. It's clear more work needs to be done on this subject before much longer, but it's not yet immediately apparent what form the necessary work will ultimately take on.
New content - Servicing the HP Apollo 9000 Series 400 Workstations is now available in the Retrotechnology Articles section of the site. It is packed with great information on troubleshooting and repairing a Series 400 workstation, whether it is running DOMAIN/OS or HP-UX. It includes block diagrams, illustrated parts breakdowns, disassembly instructions, diagnostics procedures, LED error codes, FRU part numbers, and much, much more. If you have a broken S400 workstation, you need this.
Acknowledgements - The paper copy of this manual was donated to the museum by Michael Wolfson.
R. Stricklin, curator
14 January, 2007
New content - The HP HP-UX Installing Peripherals guide for HP 9000 Series 300 workstations is now available in the Retrotechnology Articles section of the site. This manual has it all: DIO-I and DIO-II cards, memory cards, HP-IB peripherals, disk drives, tape drives, printers, plotters, graphics processors, terminals, HP-HIL options, switch settings, select codes, device major and minor numbers, everything. If you are restoring a S300 workstation, you need this.
Acknowledgements - The paper copy of this manual was donated to the museum by Michael Wolfson.
R. Stricklin, curator
29 August, 2006
New content - The IBM RT PC Options Installation guide is now available in the Retrotechnology Articles section of the site. If you are trying to restore one of these machines, or even just identify some unknown RT board, this document has what you want. The only thing it doesn't really cover is the various RT processor options, though FPA and PC Coprocessor options are included.
In case anybody was wondering, the careless safety notice translations are exactly as originally published by IBM. Shocking, I know.
R. Stricklin, curator
31 July, 2006
New content - The IBM RT PC Virtual Resource Manager Programming Reference is now available in the Retrotechnology Articles section of the site. There is a lot of good information in there about how the VRM works, including the VRM debugger and some information on the floating-point emulation layer. The latter also discusses in some depth the salient characteristics of the various floating point options available on the RT PC.
It's pretty interesting stuff. I hadn't realized how much like CP (VM/370) the VRM is, conceptually.
R. Stricklin, curator
19 May, 2006
New content - The HP Apollo 9000 Series 400 HP-UX Owner's Guide is now available in the Retrotechnology Articles section of the site. I'm shocked at what a lousy manual this is. It is easily the most useless manual I've published here. It's inappropriately conversational, unnecessarily vague, stultifyingly repetitious, and overloaded with unhelpful pictures.
But it's available for your reference. Enjoy.
R. Stricklin, curator
8 April, 2006
Two things:
New content - found a reduced, badly xeroxed copy of the SGI GL2-W3.5 Workstation Release Notes that I was able to massage into a workable PDF. It is uploaded and available in the Retrotechnology Articles section of the site.
CSS update - changed text-size: small; for font-size: 0.75em; which seems to give me the desired results in more browsers. Also removed the more baroque formatting rules for the large tables in favor of the much cleaner and completely unsupported in any browser nth-child rules. It's definitely the right thing; maybe eventually the browsers will catch up.
I really should be spending my time working on other projects right now. My avoidant personality is your gain.
R. Stricklin, curator
30 December, 2005
This is the last update before the new year.
I've been using my Christmas vacation to convert the site to CSS. The HTML is essentially completely converted; I just have some fine-tuning left to do on the style sheet itself. In a nutshell, there is one tough problem involving the visual presentation of the fhlushstones benchmark results table, as well as a small handful of minor outstanding visual issues relating to over-width content and some rendering peculiarities in IE which I may never solve satisfactorily. The CSS renders 100% correctly in both OmniWeb and Safari; Firefox gets everything right except (inexplicably) text-size: small;, and IE blows cold spew into dixie cups.
But you knew that already.
Also, there are five new Apollo software release documents contemporary with DOMAIN/IX SR9.5 (ca. 1987) published now in the Retrotechnology Articles section of the site.
R. Stricklin, curator
13 December, 2005
I decided to take a break from tradition and prepare the first non-SGI content to the PDF collection: the Apollo DOMAIN System User's Guide.
It was shocking how lousy the typesetting was, especially in comparison to what SGI, which was a brand new company at the time some of these docs were originally published, managed to produce. Apollo had been around for several more years, and despite having produced the documentation with Interleaf, there were a horrifying number of spelling errors, generally sloppy typesetting: inconsistent typefaces, margins both generous and stingy by turns, and so forth.
After some vigorous internal debate, I made a point to correct the obvious mistakes---especially where it confounded meaning---but some of the random typesetting is still present. I strive for historical accuracy, but I have no doubt had I not corrected the blatant errors, I'd be receiving an endless stream of corrections submitted by email...
Anyway, it's available for download now. Google will index it in the next couple days, if past results are any indication of future returns. I'm up way too late. Merry Christmas; this is probably the last update before the New Year.
R. Stricklin, Curator
3 December, 2005
SGI's GL2-W3.6 Workstation Release Notes are now available in the Retrotechnology Articles section of the site.
R. Stricklin, curator
21 November, 2005
SGI's GL2-W2.4 Workstation Release Notes are now available in the Retrotechnology Articles section of the site.
R. Stricklin, curator
20 November, 2005
Uploaded the PDF of the SGI GL2-W3.4 Workstation Release Notes. Take a look in the Retrotechnology Articles section of the site.
There are a handful of screen captures up in the Media Vault section, now. There didn't used to be anything there at all.
R. Stricklin, curator
16 November, 2005
Finished converting the SGI IRIS 3000 Series Owner's Guide to PDF. It's uploaded and available in the Retrotechnology Articles section of the site. As always, drop me a line if you find it useful, or discover any errors.
R. Stricklin, curator
11 January, 2005
Has it really been a year already?
I've just uploaded the first of a few PDFs of old SGI manuals relating to the IRIS 1000, 2000, and 3000-series machines. The OCR software did not produce satisfactory output, so I redid all the layouts and typesetting manually. The process is tedious, but the results are superior. Enjoy, and let me know if you find any errors.
R. Stricklin, curator
4 January, 2004
I've just been motivated to upload an (embarrassingly small) content refresh. At this rate, this site is shaping up to be more of a retirement project than anything else. We'll have to see what we can do about that, this year.
During the Summer of 2003, I did finally fit the last puzzle pieces into the AViiON NVRAM disassembly---at least enough to finish resurrecting my AV310CD---thanks to several good sports reading this site.
- Dan Veeneman
- Lubomir Sedlacik
- Steven M. Jones
- Tom Ponsford
Special thanks to Tom Ponsford, who shrewdly managed to dig up what is probably the only AV300CD in existence with a still-functioning NVRAM. I'll be putting together some documentation on this topic and posting it soon.
R. Stricklin, curator
12 November, 2002
I've been going over the HTTP referrer logs, and I noticed a number of hits to the site have been from folks doing fairly broad searches. That's pretty flattering. At the same time, it makes it hard to evaluate just what information folks are after, and whether or not they left the site with that information. It doesn't make it easier that there's still a whole pile of content I'm planning to put up eventually, but which is not actually present on the site, yet.
In the meanwhile, I'd like to solicit the input of those of you who are ending up on this site as the result of a web search.
Consider taking the time to drop me a line to let me know what you were after, and whether you found it or not. That goes double for those of you using any of these or similarly broad search phrases:
- Deskpro 590 XL
- SPARCstation 20
- Sun 411
- STP3010PGX
Your input will help me prioritize content development on this site.
R. Stricklin, curator
11 November, 2002
Since we seem to be getting hits from people actually looking for information, I've been inspired to do a bit of a facelift on the site. Enjoy.
R. Stricklin, curator